Donald Trump is out of business, at least for the next four years. But the business of Trump, the commercial brand, is marching onward. In January, shortly before taking office, the president formally ceded his corporate holdings to a trust, and handed management responsibilities at the Trump Organization over to his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. While the president promised that the company would do no “new foreign deals,” to avoid potential ethical and constitutional entanglements, the younger Trumps are otherwise bound by few constraints as they seek to expand the family business. The head of the Trump Organization’s hotel division recently disclosed that the company is planning an ambitious domestic expansion, and has signed letters of intent with developers in cities around the country, including New York, Austin, Cincinnati, and Nashville. Last month, the first of these local partners stepped forward, revealing plans for a hotel in Dallas.

“I think they are just moving full steam ahead,” the developer, Mukemmel Sarimsakci, told me. Sarimsakci, a gregarious 50-year-old immigrant, likes to introduce himself as the “Turkish Trump” — a sobriquet he claims he was given by the press in his home country. He is enthusiastically hoping to play a role in the Trump sons’ plans to launch a new mid-priced hotel chain, fittingly called Scion. In keeping with the patriarch’s business model, the Trumps will license the name and play a role in management and promotion, but it will be up to developers like Sarimsakci to actually finance and build the hotels. He signed a preliminary letter of intent with the Trump Organization on December 6, a month after the election, and if all goes well, hopes to start construction in September.

“There is no reason why it shouldn’t be,” Sarimsakci told me when I recently visited him in Dallas. “After all, it’s a business relationship, right?”

Of course, that question is never quite so simple when it comes to dealing with the Trump Organization. The president’s name is still on the marquee, and that brings all kinds of unprecedented complications, as Sarimsakci has discovered. The day before I visited him, Sarimsakci was surprised to hear that a formerly friendly Democratic city councilman had vowed to oppose his Dallas project as a rebuke to Trump, telling Politico: “I think that guy is an invalid human and I wish nothing but failure for him.” This wasn’t the developer’s first encounter with the Trump resistance. Sarimsakci’s proposal to develop another Scion in St. Louis was scuttled by street protests in November. As a naturalized citizen and a secular Muslim, Sarimsakci found himself in a strange defensive position.

“Anyone is free to invest in the United States,” he said. Sarimsakci, who goes by “Mike” here in his adopted country, went to graduate school at Stanford and still lives in the Bay Area with his family. Although he is involved in an unusually diverse array of business ventures around the world — office construction in Central Asia, renewable-energy projects in the nation of Georgia, a development for the government of Niger — he spends much of his time these days in Dallas. He is known there for the role he has played in the revival of the city’s urban core, which was a dead zone until recently, as well as his Trumpian flair for promoting his big plans, only some of which have come to fruition. “Mike was an early mover downtown,” said Mayor Michael Rawlings, a Democrat who supports his Scion plan. Sarimsakci thinks that Trump Organization’s new hotel concept, which is meant to target millennial business travelers, is well-suited to the area, which he has tried to reposition as a “tech mecca.”

Last week, I met Sarimsakci at his largest project to date, the conversion of the century-old Butler Building into another hotel and loft-like apartments. A compact, bald man whose face was flecked with gray stubble, he led me around the polished concrete floor of the basement common area, which was subdivided for various whimsical purposes: an art studio, a music performance space, a lounge filled with games. Walking out to the street, past the future location of a bespoke tailor and barbershop, Sarimsakci lit up a big Monte Cristo cigar and surveyed the nearly completed renovation. “Everyone thought we were nuts to purchase this property, because it’s surrounded by homeless shelters,” Sarimsakci said. “It was a huge risk, and a huge challenge to find financing.”

Sarimsakci relies on funding from overseas for his projects — a common strategy in the realm of real-estate finance. More than half of the capital for the $90 million Butler Building project, for instance, came via the federal EB-5 program, which offers green cards to foreign investors. (The investment was marketed primarily in China.) For the Scion project, Sarimsakci says he has lined up a group of private investors, many of them “dear friends” he has known since childhood in Turkey, along with individuals from Kazakhstan and Qatar. “It’s interesting, because all the local people thought it wasn’t a good idea to do all these things,” said Sarimsakci, as he walked me around downtown at lunch hour, pointing out new fashionable restaurants and residential construction sites.

“This was empty four years ago,” he said. “You didn’t see any of it.”

Sarimsakci said he originally connected with the Trump Organization around two years ago, when he began working with the company on plans to develop Trump-branded hotels in Turkey, Georgia, and northern Iraq. “We wanted to do it, and then it turned out that he won the election, and Mr. Trump became the president,” Sarimsakci said. As the Trump Organization pivoted, so did Sarimsakci’s plans. “Domestic was always in play,” he said. He initially floated the idea of putting a Scion into a historic building in downtown St. Louis that he is redeveloping. But after a November protest outside the building he dropped the idea, which would have been subject to city approvals.

“The emotions were very, very high, and we decided at that point it was not constructive to put that through,” Sarimsakci said. “We said, we’ll do a Marriott.”

Sarimsakci moved on to developer-friendly Dallas. The site he is eyeing for the Scion is currently a parking lot across the street from the Butler Building and the Dallas City Hall, as well as a soup kitchen that currently attracts crowds of scruffy people to the block. Rawlings, who protested the president’s original ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries, said he nonetheless welcomed the Trump Organization’s participation in the redevelopment of the area. “I have to separate it from my politics, and what I think of the president,” he said. “I’m thumbs-up on the project, and want to make sure that Dallas continues to receive the benefits of Mike being smart about this.”

Last month, Sarimsakci unveiled architectural renderings of a six-story glass-walled Scion, inspiring an onslaught of national press attention — and some local opposition. But realistically, even critics of the project admit there is little they can do to stop the hotel, so long as it requires no subsidies and conforms to the zoning code. (“You can’t discriminate in building permits,” said Philip Kingston, the Democratic councilman who has been critical of the Scion project.) Nonetheless, the development is far from being a fait accompli. A letter of intent is a nonbinding agreement, and the Trump Organization has declined to comment publicly on the deal. But Sarimsakci did say that after the news broke, he received a congratulatory phone call from Donald Trump Jr. He has never met the president, though he says he has long been an admirer. “Mr. Trump has been my idol in the real-estate development business,” Sarimsakci said. “I read all his books when I was a teenager and in college.”

Before signing the letter of intent, Sarimsakci said, the Trump Organization reviewed and approved his architectural plans, which include a “big collaborative office space” on the ground floor. “They want it to be a start-up entrepreneur atmosphere,” he said, which he says fits with the vibe he and other developers have been trying to create in downtown Dallas. “I think it’s actually a good model for up-and-coming cities,” he told me. “Our next stop after this will be St. Louis — which will happen.” He says he has already picked out a new St. Louis site that won’t face the same political hurdles as the first one. He envisions building more Scion hotels in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and San Jose.

The next day, Sarimsakci told me, he would be flying off to Mexico City, where he was working on a bid to buy a major shopping mall in Panama City. (The former owner was being forced to divest because of U.S. money-laundering sanctions.) “It’s the most prominent piece of property in Central America — it’s amazing, an amazing piece of property,” the Turkish Trump said, sounding very much like his namesake. He too has political ambitions: He says he’d one day like to be the first Turkish-American member of the U.S. Senate. (Although his planning process hasn’t gone much further than that.) But even Sarimsakci’s admiration for Trump has limits. “I didn’t do a campaign contribution to Mr. Trump, nor to Ms. Hillary,” he said. “I didn’t vote because I liked certain things in both candidates and disliked certain things both candidates, so I was torn.

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As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.

Rescue teams in Mozambique are struggling to reach the thousands of people stranded on roofs and in trees and urgently need more helicopters and boats as post-cyclone flood waters continue to rise.

Rescue workers, military personnel and volunteers are rushing to save thousands of Mozambicans before flood levels rise further, but with four helicopters, a handful of boats and extremely difficult conditions, have only been able to save about 413 so far.

“I don’t even know if we’ve made a dent. There are just so many people. The scale is huge. We’re busy doing the best we can,” said Travis Trower from Rescue South Africa, adding that a lot of people had been washed away but those still alive, whom he had seen from helicopter flights, were in a very bad state.

More than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles) in the region are flooded, according to satellite images taken by the EU, and in some places the water is six metres (19ft) deep. At least 600,000 people are affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ranging from those whose lives are in immediate danger to those who need other kinds of aid.

About 40 percent of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country, according to a studyreleased Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

The District also saw the most African American residents — more than 20,000 — displaced from their neighborhoods during that time, mostly by affluent, white newcomers, researchers said. The District and Philadelphia were most “notable” for displacements of black residents, while Denver and Austin had the most Hispanic residents move. Nationwide, nearly 111,000 African Americans and more than 24,000 Hispanics moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods, the study found.

In an essay accompanying the study, Sabiyha Prince of Empower DC said the city “rolled out the proverbial red carpet” for tens of thousands of new residents in the past five years. But the new dog parks, bike lanes, condominiums and pricey restaurants that followed, she said, are not viewed as improvements by long-term residents, who can feel isolated because of losing neighbors, social networks and local businesses. Prince, an anthropologist, said longtime Washingtonians tell stories of “alienation and vulnerability in the nation’s capital.”